We are hoping to be able to take all our Imagining Venice students to a Save Venice art restoration site in the city this summer. Save Venice is one of the charitable groups that regularly cleans and restores great art and architecture within the city; its administration was somewhat less-than-glowingly discussed in John Berendt’s fascinating nonfiction book The City of Falling Angels (2005; read an excerpt in the New York Times), but all in all I think that Save Venice has had an important and positive effect on Venice; for example, I will show you a “before” picture of the Miracoli church in class (briefly visible in the film Don’t Look Now [1973]), and when you go to Venice you’ll be amazed by how much cleaner and brighter the church is now, post-cleaning!

Today Save Venice began removing the scaffolding from its restoration of the statues on the San Sebastiano church. Here is the saint himself, looking much cleaner now!